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What's the Matter with Holocaust Education?

(JNS) Jonathan S. Tobin - At the heart of the failures of Holocaust education is that it is not taught as history. Instead, the Holocaust is part of a universal lesson about the evils of prejudice. Students are not instructed about the specifics of two millennia of Jew-hatred and how they produced the circumstances that allowed Germany - a nation known for its devotion to science and the arts - to invest vast resources on a war aimed at exterminating the Jewish people. Instead, they are taught about the irrationality of arbitrary biases against all groups. There is some value to any sort of moral education. However, it doesn't seem to have occurred to most people to ponder why it is that after so much has been done to promote knowledge of the Holocaust in schools and popular culture, why all this information and instruction hasn't had the intended effect with respect to anti-Semitism. Jews are not only the only victims of prejudice and genocide has been practiced elsewhere by others against other populations. But anti-Semitism is not an abstract idea of prejudice. Anti-Semitism is a political ideology and a way to weaponize grievances against Jews. The universalizers have helped strip the Holocaust of its meaning in a way that allows today's anti-Semites to use it as a cudgel against Israel. Programs that primarily use the Holocaust as a way to teach morality have become a hindrance to our ability to properly understand anti-Semitism.
2021-01-28 00:00:00
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